This call is being recorded. Your line is muted. Welcome to the Nimbus Q3 presentation. During the questions and answer session, participants are able to ask questions by dialing pound key five on their telephone keypad. Now, I will hand the conference over to the CEO, Jan-Erik Lindström, CFO, Rasmus Alvemyr, and Head of Investor Relations, Gunilla Öhman. Please go ahead.
Yes, thank you, and again, welcome. Business update, third quarter. A tough quarter, of course, we have an ongoing recession, and we also have a quite unstable new political environment or surrounding. Means that it's quite tricky to read, and it's not as predictable as we wish then, of course. But at the same time, this sort goes more or less the same for everyone, and especially the companies that is exporting like we are. For the quarter then, sales amounted to SEK 378 million, down by 20%. Important, if we look at the industry's development, this is actually then still a good figure, and if we look at the year so far, it's down 13%.
That is even very good if we compare it then with our peers, and our peers is then, of course, companies that, similar companies as us, and that is working then on the same leisure market as we do. We actually stand out then on the positive side. The EBITDA then, as a consequence, we have a minus 11 million SEK, compared then with the positive figure of 13. The cost levels, they are affected then by our lower production volumes, and of course, then we are decreasing capacity to this lower level, or lower demand, I should say. The ongoing process then in Finland is, among other things, then is a consequence then of that. The value boats still then on the negative side.
So far, or for the last twelve months, we have lost SEK 40 million, which is quite high figure then, but it is a soft market. It is tough. Also, if we look market-wise, the European market is then very soft. We have a year-over-year 61% down for the sales. Of course, softer than expected, and Europe is an important market, but remember that despite this decrease, we are actually then holding up quite well, and that is, of course, thanks to the fact that we are a global player, and we are not depending on a single market anymore. We will come back to this in Europe because it's also interesting things happening there.
On the positive side, we have an increased order intake in Q3 of 18% year-over-year. During the quarter, we'll also have the official launch of our new biggest ship, we can say, the new Nimbus 495, and that was in Cannes during September. And so far, we have 10 orders done for production during the full year 2025. That is already on board. And that is a very good figure, very good figure. We have also started the production pre-series of the Aquador 400, and that is of course important for us. That means that we now have the complete three boat series, and the Aquador brand then will be sold globally. And I have talked about this before during previous presentations.
We have been here so long now, so we know what works, and the Aquador will be perfect for the global, or our global network, I should say. We have also then received the order, the Alukin order, or through Alukin, I should say, from FMV, with a potential value then of up to 400 million SEK, and this is then a really interesting business opportunity for us, of course. We have experience from that professional market before. We have sold boats to the police, coast guard, fire brigade, and things like that, but we have never received an order from FMV, and we have never received as big order as this, so that is promising for the future, if we can change slide.
A short reminder, Nimbus Group, founded in 1968, so we have been around for a while. We have a very long history of international trade. Already in 1970, we started the export, so that is something that is daily business, more or less for us. We have our house of well-known global brands, and we score high in all these different brand awareness in the investigations that is done frequently then. We're always at the top. I will not repeat everything that this slide says. It's a lot of North America, and that, of course, is not that strange.
North America is more than 50% of the world market, and if you want to be a player in our industry, you need to be present in the U.S. As you can see at the bottom, U.S. today is actually our single biggest market. So we then go to the next slide. A little bit about the order book development. The order book amounted to 508 million SEK, and that is actually the same as last quarter. That is also then another sign that we now can see that the market is leveling off. And also interesting, if you look at the relation to the last twelve months, you can see that we now are on 28%, same as last month.
Actually, then, if we look at the chart to the one on the right side, you can see that it started then. We start here, Q3 2019, the last normal year, and what is normal today, that is of course a question, but as we see it, the last normal year. Then we had the same 28%, and this is normal for us. We will not see long order books as we saw during the pandemic, even if I think that we will have slightly higher ratio than we have today. It's still that we don't have that long order books in our industry, same as the car industry, for example.
And as I said before, the order intake in Q3 increased then 18% year-over-year. And interesting then is that Europe actually stands for a big part of it, and I know that Rasmus will get back to that later on. But that's interesting, and of course also very important for us. The indication in quarter two then that we had to shift towards short order book timeframe then has been then more or less confirmed, and you can say that we now see the normalized picture from that perspective. Of course, positive effects from Nimbus 495 and Alukin, and it should be like that. New sales in our business and product development is one of our cornerstones. So, it's exactly as we want to see it.
Only confirmed orders in the order book as before, and it's prepayment, of course. And if we do the same comparison that I did before and look at the Q3 2019, same level, or same ratio, I should say, but softer quality, because at that time, we didn't have that rule when we looked at the order book. And the order from FMV is not included. It's only the pre-series or the prototype, you can say, that is included in the order book. And with that, I leave this to Rasmus.
Thank you, Jan-Erik. Now, we move on with the sales development per market, and start with the North America. The North America dropped by 3% to SEK 201 million, and the drop was driven by lower sales from the EdgeWater brand, due to the market situation. On the other hand, the Nimbus brand increased the sales by 42% in the quarter year-over-year, which is very strong, we think. The U.S. market as a whole went down by about 10-15% in the retail segment to end customers in the same period.
The Nordics dropped by 5%, but the signals tells us that the markets now has seemed to bottom out, due to the fact that we see that the order intake has increased year-over-year. Sales in Europe came out as a disappointment, with its sales drop of 61% year-over-year in relation to our expectations in front of the summer season. This was a drop by around SEK 100 million, having, of course, big impact on our both our P&L and the inventory. But important here to mention is also that the order intake in Europe actually has increased compared with last year, which means that last year's sales was therefore mostly driven by an older order book. Other markets went down from SEK 19 million to SEK 8 million, but of course, on low levels.
On LTM basis, other markets corresponds to less than 4% of the total sales. On LTM basis, we also see that North America continues to grow by 36% year-over-year, and that the Nordics and Europe has dropped by 21%, respectively, 34%. Also, other market has increased by 21%. Net sales in the quarter amounted to SEK 378 million, which is down 20% year-over-year. And as I said before, the drop here is driven by the European market, which has had a soft situation. Sales from own dealers has remained on the same level as last year and amounted to SEK 114 million, compared with SEK 112 million last year. So it's slightly higher.
Sales to external dealers and direct sales, including spare parts, went up to SEK 264 million, which was down 27% year-over-year, and this is also driven by this European slowdown that I mentioned. On LTM basis, the net sales ended up at SEK 1,706 million, which is now down by 9% year-over-year. And then we come to the EBITDA. The EBITDA in the third quarter amounted to minus SEK 69 million, compared with plus SEK 13 million last year. And the difference is driven by this restructuring provision of SEK 55 million related to the Finnish production and from also lower sales volumes, of course, having a big impact on our gross profit by around SEK 20 million.
On a twelve-month basis, the losses from the valuable business amount to about SEK 40 million, which means that an adjusted EBIT on LTM basis without the value boats would have reached about SEK 56 million, including, of course, taking into account the restructuring provision, and an EBITDA margin of 3.3%. On top of this, it's also important to have in mind that the temporary production stop was made in the first quarter in EdgeWater in order to reduce dealer inventory levels. This had a negative impact for first and the second quarter of SEK 36 million. Since the second quarter, the gross margin has been recovered from the former negative currency effects that affected mostly 2023, but partly also the first quarter, 2024.
These margins are now restored with correct price lists and which are reflected in the order book. But however, this effect has been offset by the cost absorption effect from lower production, which makes the gross margin flat in total. Cash flow and working capital, the net working capital, increased in the third quarter and ended up at SEK 563 million, which is up SEK 15 million since the second quarter. The net working capital is of course affected by those higher levels of finished boats, mostly due to this soft European market, with less in for out sales than what we anticipated in front of the season. Operating cash flow in the period amounted to -SEK 69 million, mostly driven by less prepayments since the second quarter.
The net working capital in relation to LTM sales amounted to 33% versus 27% last year. With that, I leave the word to you, Jan-Erik.
Thank you. Financial targets, then, and then we actually stick to the very same, meaning that we want to have, or we are aiming at the growth above 10% on midterm, going forward. The EBITDA margin 10% then, and then for us, it's to reach it again. The capital structure will be no financial debt, and we have no financial debt, and we are only allowed, so to say, to have it when it's related to property, and we want to be a company that use dividend as one of the tools, so we have a dividend policy that we will have 30% of the result as dividend. If we then look forward, before we goes to the Q&As, the financial calendar, the Q4 report will then be presented the 4th of February, 2025 , and with that, I leave to questions and to Gunilla.
So do we have any questions from the telephone conference? So operator, are there no questions from the telephone conference?
There's no questions, no.
Okay. Thank you very much. And we don't have any questions from the web either. So with that, I thank you all for listening in, and welcome back in February. Thank you.
Thank you.